MMO's and other PC games are a particular interest of mine. One I spend all too much time doing. Iggep's Blog is where I'll be expressing my thoughts on the various games I play and the industry as a whole.

Friday, June 5, 2009

Inscription needs to be redesigned

I had thought I'd posted about this previously but a cursory look on the blog indicates I must have been dreaming. At any rate, I had mentioned over the past few weeks that I had started to level a Paladin though I'm not sure I mentioned I did get him to level 80. I never did mention that I picked up Herbology and Inscription on him and have since leveled that to 435. There really is not reason to level it past 430 since the only things that will give you points are the daily major research and the Northern cards, so I pick up a point every day and that's good enough for me. And I had been able to form a few first hand opinions on the trade, so I found it enlightening that Tobold and Gevlon largely agree with those opinions.

Inscription is by far the easiest tradeskill to level up. And that is saying a lot considering how easy Alchemy is to level; however it is also the least well considered of all the tradeskills (I do not personally consider engineering to be a trade skill). It's major problem, apart from every other trade skill, is that something a level 20 character purchases from an inscriptor can still be used at level 80. Once you settle on a set of Glyphs there is never a need to upgrade or replace them. There is no upgrade path so more than a handful of inscriptors can literally flood the market.

In the heady days of early WotLK and after the introduction of the new randomly learned glyphs in patch 3.1, inscriptor did make a great deal of money, but those days are long gone now. Only certain specific glyphs make any money now, and every inscriptor on the server knows it. You can make cards and hope you can sell the ones that aren't really worth all that much, or hope you are able to put together some Nobles decks though you should expect doing that to be a lengthy and expensive process. I decided after a few attempts that it simply wasn't worth it and decided to make my money from selling inks and glyphs instead. Between selling gems and glyphs and doing dailies I'm satisfied but I won't be hitting that money cap any time soon.

I'd really like to see Blizzard take Inscription back to the drawing board. Build in some upgrade path into the system of glyphs in order to give inscriptors a residual income.